RIGA OPERA SIRÈNE DANS LE BROUILLARD DU MATIN (2022) Painting by Dags

RIGA OPERA MERMAID IN THE MORNING FOG
65x82cm oil/ linen canvas 2022
Dags Vidulejs ⓒ dags

Sketch of 2008 According to the impressions of the premiere of Antonin Dvorak’s opera “Mermaid” Mermaid is a mythological creature that lives in water. In art, she is depicted as a beautiful woman with a fish tail.

Father, the poet Valdis Rūja, worked as the director of the Opera House. That is why the first memories of childhood are about the magic of theater. Red velvet chairs you can’t climb on, the director’s lodge edging, sniffing and bubbling in the auditorium waiting for a call. The abyss of an orchestra pit with a rumble, long beautiful legs in ballet puantes on the toes, and a skirt like an umbrella and bottoms from below, a rubbed plank floor in the exercise room behind the piano, a buffet staircase to the basement and a standing table with delicacies. As well as the live all night opera fountain Nāra, who seduces on the black canal in the moonlight, after the show, going home through the parks to Zaubes Street, with her big dad at hand.

In 2008, after the premiere of Dvořák’s opera “NĀRA”, an ink drawing was made in the most beautiful park in Riga, sitting on a block of watercolor paper until morning. Sitting in a warm grass, where you could find fragrant lace linen among the flowers. From the nightclubs of Old Riga, the girls who were still completely free at night lured the lilac bushes of the park in Riga to the much intoxicated seekers of the northern lands. However, the fountains and Dvořák’s Mermaid have turned the girl into magical fairies and mermaids, who lure stray romantics with love hearts to the canal to the redeeming heart and forgetfulness to Mermaid’s embrace.

During the mystical curfew of 2021, when not coming home, past police punishment patrols, spending the night under the park’s long willow hair, glistening in the blue emerald light, under the Basteja canal bridge, the Mermaid and the Beaver roared again seeing mosquitoes and wiggles.

«In 2022, after a catastrophic change in the system of government, after the start of the war, global freezing, rising radiation levels, violent restrictions on human rights, strange things began. According to eyewitness accounts from the canals, rivers, fountains and wells, strangely charming virgins have begun to appear. Who have seduced lonely thinkers who have sought refuge from their harassing absences. Many missing people appeared in the press. There is no reliable information about whether it was possible to move to another dimension through these water portal portals.

The stalemate in the development of civilization forced people to be amphibious creatures. For amphibians living both on land and in water. If you are sitting on the edge of a pond, your feet are not visible. And the gills open easily. And it was a long time before people closed their gills. Not to take for granted, but to talk to the body and think in action.»